Yes, in Pencil

I.

Someone has written "yes" beside a paragraph about grief, in pencil, in 1994, and pressed hard enough that I can feel it on the other side of the page like a scar.

I don't know what they agreed with. The paragraph is ordinary. It says that mourning has no schedule, which everyone knows and nobody believes until the morning it applies to them.

II.

This is the whole argument for second-hand books: the previous reader is still in there, underlining, disagreeing, folding a corner at the exact place where something landed.

A library book is a séance conducted by strangers who will never meet and never need to.

III.

I add nothing. I have a rule about that. But I take the book down twice a year and look at the word "yes" and the dent it made and think about a person in 1994 sitting somewhere with a pencil, alone, finding one sentence that held.

That is all a poem has to do. That is all any of this has to do.

IV.

There is a second hand in this book, later, in biro, correcting a date in the footnotes. Officious. Certain. I like that one less and keep it anyway, because a margin is not a place for agreement, it is a place for whoever turned up.

Two strangers and me, and the paragraph, and the long quiet afternoon it takes to notice that none of us were reading alone.